Season closing part 1 - soil warming

What worked and what didn't in the veggie patch:







Eggplants and peppers were out of this world this year. Seriously, the eggplants performed like zucchini. And like those most notorious of vegetables, I felt like standing at the edge of the drive with armfuls saying, "please take some." Unfortunately, they also share the fact that not everyone is crazy about them (like me.)



Previous years, I have had adequate success with hot peppers but very poor luck with eggplants or sweet peppers.



I have now learned to use a technique called soil warming. This involves covering the soil with clear plastic about 2 weeks or more before planting - I use vapour barrier - and cutting holes in to plant. Seriously, the contrast is between getting a couple mishapen fruit to huge, healthy plants loaded with fruit. This year was not more ideal than most either. It was all down to this fantastic techique. See my demonstration earlier in the year.



Thanks again Ken Allan

Eggplant with Nose

Okay, those hybridizers have just gone too far!



This is today's harvest of an asian type long eggplant (can't find the seed packet... grr). Anyhow, its a prolific thing. This was going to be the last year I grew eggplants but now I consider it the first successful of many, or so I hope.

I thank clear plastic mulch to warm the beds along with the variety that I picked because from my reseach it seems that long and smaller fruited eggplants are more adapted to cooler, shorter seasons than the bigger italian ones. However, I did this research in the depths of winter and will have to recreate it for you on another post. If anyone knows HARD FACTS about this or something that contradicts this, let me know.

Anyhow, today's harvest gave me pause. The little guy above not only had a nose but a perfectly parted hairdo. (I admit that I added the Mr. Potato Head eyes).

Reheading cabbage and short season sweet potato update

It's that time of year where I spend all my time gardening, and less time looking up gardening questions unless, of course, there is some problem...


So far, so good.


We have pests: cabbage moth, cucumber beetle, colarado potato beeltle (which only seems to be interested in my physalias - the primary reason I grow the invasive darlings). We have see-saw weather, but so far my veggie crises are minimal.



Re-heading cabbage



Same savoy as in the above link.


Can you see them? Darling little heads growing at the leaf axils as promised! They should make nice tender additions to a soup, a stirfry, my sandwich...

Sweet Potato Mulch

Short season sweeet potatoes starting to vine.


I keep hearing about how these things live by the same 'take-over-the-world-or-at-least-the-garden' moto as pumpkins so I am glad to see they are starting to live up to the promise.



Tender Fruit



Long, oriental type eggplant.


Thanks to clear plastic mulch, this is the first year that I have had such an impressive crop of sweet peppers and eggplants. Okay, perhaps I should be more clear. I have grown eggplants for three years in a row. The previous two years I have gotten less than 4 egg-fruits. Really, I hesitate to call them eggplant fruit at all as they were pathetic examples. I do not blaim the plants themselves but their growing conditions.



Mini-bells, italian frying and some other kind of pepper. They got knocked over as seedlings. It'll be a nearly blind taste test.

Thanks to Ken Allan's amazing book on growing short season sweet potatoes in the north called Sweet Potatoes in the Home Garden, I now have a new way to 'extend my climate zone.' Plastic mulch increases soil temperature which many plants, such as the aforementioned, appreciate.


Ken, you are one of my gardening idols.

Overwintering Peppers

After reading that:

Hortiphilia Fact

Peppers are perrenials

At least hot peppers are.

I wondered if you could keep them alive for a second growing season. Food producing plants that self seed, overwinter, or are perrenial makes me giddy! So I did some research and found that many people were keeping their hot peppers, and eggplants(? - more reseach to follow) alive to grow another season. So I brought in one of my potted babies. Here it is, a long cayenne, behind the azalea in beautiful bloom.



When I first brought it in, it experienced leaf drop but then started to grow a bunch of new leaves, and flowers. I have been dutifully picking them off so it saves its energy for another season. Hopefully, as according to, Pepper Joe they will produce an early crop next year!

Go to Part Two - A Pepper by Any Other Name...

Sites:

http://www.gardenerscorner.org/subject073929.htm
http://www.rocoto.com/overwinter.html
http://www.gardensalive.com/article.asp?ai=641&bhcd2=1169352244